Recording: You Can't Catch Me by John Lennon – 9 July 1974

On Tuesday 9 July 1974, John Lennon began the New York sessions for his Rock 'N' Roll album at the Record Plant in New York City. Twenty-four boxes of tapes arrived in the city that day, and Lennon spent several hours reviewing the audio before overdubbing fresh vocals onto 'You Can't Catch Me' – a Chuck Berry song whose backing track had been recorded on 11 December 1973. He also taped messages for the producers of the forthcoming stage show John, Paul, George, Ringo… & Bert.

The session marked a significant turning point in the troubled history of the Rock 'N' Roll album – a project that had begun with enormous promise and descended into one of the more chaotic episodes in Lennon's post-Beatles career.

The Phil Spector Sessions: Background

The Rock 'N' Roll album had its origins in a legal settlement. In 1973, Lennon was sued by Morris Levy, the owner of Big Seven Music, over the similarity between 'Come Together' – the opening track of Abbey Road – and Chuck Berry's 'You Can't Catch Me', which Levy published. The settlement required Lennon to record three songs from Levy's catalogue on his next album.

Lennon turned the obligation into an opportunity. Rather than simply fulfilling the legal requirement, he decided to record a full album of rock and roll covers – the music of his childhood, the songs that had made him want to be a musician in the first place. He enlisted Phil Spector as producer.

The Los Angeles sessions with Spector began in October 1973 and were, by most accounts, extraordinary in their chaos. Spector's Wall of Sound production style – dense, orchestrated, overwhelming – was applied to rock and roll standards with mixed results. The sessions were also marked by Spector's increasingly erratic behaviour: he arrived armed, fired guns in the studio, and created an atmosphere of barely controlled disorder.

Then, in early 1974, Spector disappeared. He took the master tapes with him. For several months, Lennon had no access to the recordings he had made.

Recovering the Tapes

The recovery of the tapes was achieved with the assistance of Al Coury, Capitol Records' vice president. Coury negotiated the return of the 24 boxes of master tapes that arrived in New York City on 9 July 1974. Their arrival allowed Lennon to finally assess what had been recorded in Los Angeles and to begin the process of completing the album.

What Lennon found when he reviewed the tapes was a mixed picture. Some of the Spector productions were usable; others were not. The New York sessions – beginning on 9 July – were designed to supplement the Los Angeles recordings with new overdubs and, where necessary, entirely new takes. Lennon produced the New York sessions himself.

The overdub of fresh vocals onto 'You Can't Catch Me' on 9 July was the first of these corrective sessions. The backing track, recorded on 11 December 1973, was retained; Lennon's new vocal replaced whatever had been recorded in Los Angeles.

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'You Can't Catch Me': The Song

'You Can't Catch Me' was written and recorded by Chuck Berry in 1956. It was one of Berry's most celebrated early recordings – a fast, witty car song with the kind of wordplay and rhythmic drive that had made Berry the defining figure of rock and roll songwriting.

The song's connection to The Beatles was long-established. Lennon had borrowed the opening line – "Here come old flat-top" – for 'Come Together', the song that had triggered the lawsuit with Morris Levy. Recording 'You Can't Catch Me' for the Rock 'N' Roll album was therefore both a legal obligation and a kind of acknowledgement: Lennon paying his debt to Berry directly, in the most literal way possible.

The released version of 'You Can't Catch Me' on the Rock 'N' Roll album used the Spector backing track from December 1973 with Lennon's new vocal from 9 July 1974. It was one of the album's stronger tracks – Berry's original energy intact beneath Lennon's assured, relaxed vocal.

John, Paul, George, Ringo… & Bert

Also on 9 July 1974, Lennon recorded messages for the producers of John, Paul, George, Ringo… & Bert, a stage musical written by Willy Russell that was about to open at the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool. The show dramatised the story of The Beatles through the eyes of a fictional fan named Bert, and had been developed with the involvement – at least in spirit – of the former Beatles themselves.

The show transferred to the Lyric Theatre in London later in 1974 and was a significant critical success, helping to establish Willy Russell as one of Britain's leading playwrights. It was an early example of the Beatles-as-cultural-phenomenon that would eventually produce Backbeat, Nowhere Boy, and Yesterday.

9 July 1974: Two Stories, One Day

The 9 July 1974 Lennon session at the Record Plant happened on the same day that Wings were rehearsing at Curly Putman's farm in Nashville – running through 'Band On The Run', 'Jet', 'Live And Let Die', and the rest of their touring set, while also navigating the rejected MPL contracts that would have formalised the band's financial structure.

It was a characteristic moment in the post-Beatles story: Lennon in New York, working through the wreckage of the Phil Spector sessions; McCartney in Nashville, preparing for a world tour with a band that was about to lose two of its members. The four former Beatles were, as always in this period, pursuing entirely separate trajectories.

The Rock 'N' Roll Album

Rock 'N' Roll was eventually released in February 1975. It contained fourteen tracks – covers of songs by Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers, and others – produced partly by Phil Spector (the Los Angeles sessions) and partly by Lennon himself (the New York sessions). The album reached number six in the UK and number six in the US.

Critical reception was mixed. Some reviewers found it a joyful return to Lennon's roots; others felt the Spector productions were overblown and that the album as a whole lacked the urgency of the originals. It remains one of the more unusual entries in Lennon's solo catalogue – a record born of legal obligation that became, in its better moments, a genuine act of love for the music that had made him.

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More from On This Day in Beatles History

• Phil Spector: The Musician Who Became The Beatles' Lifelong Enemy
• John Lennon After The Beatles: From Beatle to New Yorker
• John Lennon Records Imagine Sessions at Record Plant – 4 July 1971
• Wings rehearse in Nashville – 9 July 1974
• On This Day in Beatles History – full archive

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